Tag: release

Let’s explore the new software and features in the latest release of Rancher, which you can use by running the rancher/server:v1.6.11 image. Check our documentation on Installing Rancher Server if you need help running Rancher.

We’ve just released Rancher v1.6, the latest version of our container management platform. While we still recommend that production or mission-critical deployments use our most recent stable release, we’re excited to share what’s new in v1.6. In this release, we’ve built greater control for our users over their storage and secrets.

Validating EBS Support

We first implemented support for EBS before Rancher itself was even generally available, but in v1.6, we’re removing the ‘experimental’ tag. In addition to fixing some minor issues flagged by our community, this release contains:

Availability-zone aware scheduling for better container management within the same AZ

Additional options for EBS volumes: now users can specify options like volumetype, encrypted, and snapshotltd

Consider our EBS support ready for production!

As a side note, Rancher EBS support and development of Project Longhorn should not be considered conflicting efforts – we will always support popular and leading technologies, AWS included. While Project Longhorn is slated for eventual inclusion into Rancher, it’s still experimental, and for now Longhorn and Rancher remain separate.Read more

I’m super excited to unveil Project Longhorn, a new way to build distributed block storage for cloud- and container-based deployments. Following the principles of microservices, we have leveraged containers to build distributed block storage out of small independent components, and use container orchestration to coordinate these components to form a resilient distributed system.

Why Longhorn?

To keep up with the growing scale of cloud- and container-based deployments, distributed block storage systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The number of volumes a storage controller serves continues to increase. While storage controllers in the early 2000s served no more than a few dozen volumes, modern cloud environments require tens of thousands to millions of distributed block storage volumes. Storage controllers have therefore become highly complex distributed systems. Read more

On Friday we released version 1.5 of the Rancher container management platform. The enhancements in this release are designed to help ensure enterprise- as well as production-readiness. Additional webhooks improve Rancher extensibility and enable you to optimize overall infrastructure utilization. New API, networking and container scheduling policies provide fine-grained control of the container environment. Additional enhancements include metadata performance improvements and conditional logic support for catalog templates. Read more

Rancher 1.4 is out today! As always, we encourage you to review the release notes. However, we’d like to run through a few notable changes, and the rationale behind them here.

First, we’ve continued our move towards a friendlier Kubernetes experience by transitioning to Dashboard and Helm, which replace the Rancher Kubernetes UI and Catalog Kubernetes templates, respectively. We started this move in 1.3 as both Dashboard and Helm have matured tremendously in the past year, and we feel they’ve reached production stability and feature parity with what they’re replacing. Our goal at Rancher Labs is always to support mainstream container technologies, and integrating Dashboard and Helm is a natural part of that philosophy.

Earlier this week, we released Rancher 1.3. It includes several new features: user interface fixes, changes to our DNS engines, and improvements when using Kubernetes and associated tooling. However, Rancher 1.3 also begins addressing a frequent request we receive from users: Windows 2016 support.

Windows support in Rancher 1.3 is purely experimental and limited in scope (you can read more in our docs), but it’s an important step towards serving the needs of our customers as containers become more widely adopted in enterprises. A huge portion of the world’s workloads run on Windows server and client systems, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future; our goal at Rancher Labs is to make applications truly portable across clouds and infrastructure, and enabling workloads with Windows containers is a key part of that vision. Read more